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The journey is always the same, and never the same. As Ian Bostridge remarks, at the end of his prize-winning book Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession, when the wanderer asks Der Leiermann, “Will you play your hurdy-gurdy to my songs?”, in the final song of Winterreise, the ‘crazy but logical procedure would be to go right back to the beginning of the whole cycle and start all over again’.

It felt rather decadent to be sitting in an opera house at 12pm. Even more so given the passion-fuelled excesses of Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, which might seem rather too sensual and savage for mid-day consumption.

Manitoba Opera opened its 45th season with Puccini’s Madama Butterfly proving that the aching heart as expressed through art knows no racial or cultural divide, with the Italian composer’s self-avowed favourite opera still able to spread its poetic wings across time and space since its Milan premiere in 1904.

In 1992, concert promoter Heinz Liebrecht introduced pianist Julius Drake to tenor Ian Bostridge and an acclaimed, inspiring musical partnership was born. On Wenlock Edge formed part of their first programme, at Holkham Hall in Norfolk; and, so, in this recital at Middle Temple Hall, celebrating their 25 years of music-making, the duo included Vaughan Williams’ Housman settings for tenor, piano and string quartet alongside works with a seventeenth-century origin or flavour.

Not many (maybe any) of the new operas presented by San Francisco Opera over the past 10 years would lure me to the War Memorial Opera House a second time around. But for Girls of the Golden West just now I would be there again tomorrow night and the next, and I am eagerly awaiting all future productions.

It’s taken a while for Rossini’s Semiramide to reach the Covent Garden stage. The last of the operas which Rossini composed for Italian theatres between 1810-1823, Semiramide has had only one outing at the Royal Opera House since 1887, and that was a concert version in 1986.

‘His master’s masterpiece, the work of heaven’: ‘a common fountain’ from which flow ‘pure silver drops’. At the risk of effulgent hyperbole, I’d suggest that Antonio’s image of the blessed governance and purifying power of the French court - in the opening scene of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi - is also a perfect metaphor for the voice of French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky, as it slips through Handel’s roulades like a silken ribbon.

From the start of Lyric Opera of Chicago’s splendid, new production of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre conflict and resolution are portrayed throughout with moving intensity. The central character Brünnhilde is sung by Christine Goerke and her father Wotan by Eric Owens.

Compared to the oft-explored world of German lieder and French chansons, the songs of Russia are unfairly neglected in recordings and in the concert hall. The raw emotion and expansive lyricism present in much of this repertoire was clearly in evidence at the Holywell Music Room for the penultimate day of the celebrated Oxford Lieder Festival.

This concert was an event on several levels - marking a decade since the death of Stockhausen, the fortieth anniversary (almost to the day) since Singcircle first performed STIMMUNG (at the Round House), and their final public performance of the piece. It was also a rare opportunity to hear (and see) Stockhausen’s last completed purely electronic work, COSMIC PULSES - an overwhelming visual and aural experience that anyone who was at this concert will long remember.

Winston Graham’s 1961 novel Marnie was bold for its time. Its themes of sexual repression, psychological suspense and criminality set within the dark social fabric of contemporary Britain are but outlier themes of the anti-heroine’s own narrative of deceit, guilt, multiple identities and blackmail.

On November 12, 2017, Arizona Opera presented Giacomo Puccini’s verismo opera, Tosca, in a dramatic production directed by Tara Faircloth. Her production utilized realistic scenery from Seattle Opera and detailed costumes from the New York City Opera. Gregory Allen Hirsch’s lighting made the set look like the church of St. Andrea as some of us may have remembered it from time gone by.

‘Only make the reader’s general vision of evil intense enough and his own experience, his own imagination, his own sympathy and horror will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.’

Austrian singer Elisabeth Kulman has had an interesting career trajectory. She began her singing life as a soprano but later shifted to mezzo-soprano/contralto territory. Esteemed on the operatic stage, she relinquished the theatre for the concert platform in 2015, following an accident while rehearsing Tristan.

The morning sickness, miscarriage and maundering wraiths are still present, but Katie Mitchell’s Lucia di Lammermoor, receiving its first revival at the ROH, seems less ‘hysterical’ this time round - and all the more harrowing for it.

Nothing but a wall and a floor (and an enormous battery of unseen lighting instruments) and two perfectly matched artists, the Manon of soprano Ellie Dehn and the des Grieux of tenor Michael Fabiano, the centerpiece of Paris’ operatic Belle Époque found vibrant presence on the War Memorial stage.

For their 2011/12 season at the Barbican Hall, the BBC Symphony Orchestra
are exploring all of the symphonies of Sibelius. So for their concert on
Saturday 10th December, whose main work was Walton’s Belshazzar’s
Feast, it made sense to include Sibelius’s suite Belshazzar’s
Feast based on music a wrote for a play, and in addition Gerald Finley,
the baritone soloist in the Walton cantata, sang three of Sibelius’s songs
with orchestra. To open, conductor Edward Gardner had chosen Britten’s
Sinfonia da Requiem, written just 8 years after Walton’s
Belshazzar’s Feast had been premiered.

The Sinfonia da Requiem was originally a commission from the
Japanese Government, but Britten’s symphony with its Christian Pacifist
sentiment was not acceptable to the Japanese and the work was premiered by the
New York Philharmonic conducted by Sir John Barbirolli. It is one of only two
works for full orchestra alone by Britten which include the word symphony in
its title (the other is the Cello Symphony). In the Sinfonia da
Requiem Britten does use traditional sonata form, but the work has a three
movement structure with the music moving continuously from the opening
‘Lacrymosa’ (Andante ben misurati) to the concluding ‘Requiem
Aeternam’ (Andante molto tranquillo), with only the central
movement, ‘Dies Irae’(Allegro con fuoco) being at a
faster tempo.

Edward Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave a strong performance
which had an involving dramatic propulsion, reflecting perhaps both the
composer’s and the conductor’s involvement with the operatic stage. Britten
used a large orchestra but Gardner drew some very finely grained playing from
the orchestra players.

The three Sibelius songs presented us with a microcosm of Sibelius’s wider
career. ‘Kom no hit, död’ (Come away death) was originally written for a
production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in 1909, but was
orchestrated by Sibelius in 1957, the final year of his life. It is a dark and
mysterious piece, with harp arpeggios underlying the plain vocal line. ‘Pa
verandan vid havet’ (On a balcony beside the sea) was a piece of existential
angst setting a text by the Swedish symbolist poet Viktor Rydberg and was
written in 1903. The orchestral introduction came directly from the world of
Sibelius symphonies, catching the brooding despair of the poem. The austere
vocal line helped bring out the music of the Swedish language and the piece
concluded with an astonishing outburst at the end. Whereas the first 2 songs
had been in Swedish, the final one, ‘Koskenlaskijan morisamet’(The
Rapids-Rider’s Brides) was in Finnish. The poem by August Ahlqvist-Oksanen
has strong links to the Kalevala and Sibelius’s setting dates from
the same period as his Kalevala-inspired works such as the
Leminkainen Legends. The piece is a long narrative lyric ballad with a
tragic end. All three pieces were well put over by Finley, in each creating a
small drama, but in the concluding moments of the ballad, Finley’s voice was
in danger of being overwhelmed at the climaxes.

After the interval the Sibelius Suite from Belshazzar’s Feast
consisted of four movements for small orchestra, all evoking the exotic
oriental world of the play for which they were written (Hjalmar Procope’s
Belshazzar’s Feast premiered in 1906), though still filtered through
Sibelius’s own distinctive melodic voice. They formed an interestingly small
scale prelude to Walton’s far larger work, though the completist in me did
wonder whether something from Handel’s oratorio on the subject couldn’t
have been included as well!

Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast is rather a large scale work to
find onto the platform of the Barbican Hall. The work was originally premiered
at Leeds Town Hall, not exactly a large venue but one with a platform able to
accommodate far more singers than at the Barbican. This meant that the BBC
Symphony Chorus fielded just 150 singers to battle it out with Walton’s huge
orchestra. Edward Gardner’s approach to the piece took no prisoners as he
emphasised the brilliant, 1930’s glitter of the work with both chorus and
orchestra combining to give a bright, sharp edged account. It was unfortunate
that in the dramatic recitation at the opening, the men of the chorus failed to
find complete unanimity. Walton’s setting is not, of course, simply about
noisy bombast, and there were many fine quieter moments when both orchestra and
chorus gave us some fine poised singing and playing. In the semi-chorus section
(‘The trumpeters and pipers’) a smaller group of the BBC Symphony Chorus
delivered a nicely subdued performance whilst not quite erasing memories of the
BBC Singers in the same passage.

As baritone soloist, Gerald Finley brought superb commitment and dramatic
credibility to the role, making every single word of Walton’s recitatives
tell. But Finley’s is not a huge voice and the price to pay for his
intelligent delivery was the simple fact that at key moments his voice did not
quite ride over the orchestra the way it should have done. The extra brass
players were placed in the balcony of the hall, giving rise to some interesting
aural and spatial effects. Gardener’s control of his huge forces was
impressive. But his structuring of the work itself was such that he rather
emphasised the gaps between the different sections, making the work a series of
separate movements rather than a single dramatic whole.

London does not really have an ideal venue for Walton’s large scale
cantata and it was interesting and enterprising of the BBC to try putting the
work into the Barbican Hall. The BBC Symphony Chorus did a sterling job at
projecting both words and music, but there were moments when the sound was just
not quite massive enough. But a lot of the piece did work surprisingly well and
the struggle between chorus and orchestra almost became part of the raison
d’être of the performance.